Cuil Search Engine - The big hype, even bigger disappointment.
Comments (4)By in SEO on 12th August 2008
Recently launched cuil search engine has alot of hype going around lately, personally I think it’s a really good marketing tactic to get this kinda traffic going on, just look at their Alexa traffic graph below. This kinda hype is done by…..okay I have no freakin’ idea how but it has to do something with stumble upon, digg or some kinda social media marketing tactic and not just social media but forums as well.
It’s infact really disappointing that the big hype is about nothing if you click the image below to enlarge it you’ll see that it doesn’t even pull up my main site for the main term of the domain itself, that’s a pretty big boo-boo in my book. Try your site out on cuil, you’ll be disappointed too.
Earlier this promotional review was posted on digitalpoint:
There’s a big new search engine launching Monday: Cuil. Developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, it’s pitched as bigger, faster, and better than Google’s flagship search engine in pretty much every way. They have 121,617,892,992 web pages indexed already.
I have not had a chance to spend much time with the engine. I’m getting open access to it the same time you are. It’s a very serious effort, and it has enough funding to get off the ground and become a player.
The most important difference between Cuil and Google is its ranking system. Rather than assigning priority to pages based on inbound links as Google does (”Pagerank”), Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to divine their relevance to a search query. Costello bristled when I asked if this was a semantic search engine like PowerSet (recently sold to Microsoft). Costello said Cuil’s search is “contextual,” and that, “we’re trying to understand the real world, not the Web.”
What this means, in the real world, is that Cuil results are automatically categorized. When you search for a common name, for example, Cuil will give you a result page where results for different individuals with that name are groups under tabs. It will also break out sub-topics related to each name. In Cuil’s canned demo, if you search for “Harry,” there are different tabs for “Harry Potter” and “Prince Harry of Wales.” On the Harry Potter tab, you’ll get further sub-links devoted to actors, Gryffindor dorm-mates, etc. “We have a strong ontological commitment,” Costello told me, meaning that parsing search results into readable chunks is a very big part of the Cuil value proposition.
The service also displays images from Web results whenever possible. It all adds up to search results pages that are much more attractive, and useful, than Google’s.
Another potential advantage of the context-based search is that it allows Cuil searches to be more respectful of user privacy. Unlike Google, which simply has to track every single click to refine its index, Cuil’s context-based search does not. In practice, the distinction may be moot because Cuil will need to track clicks to see if their results are actually working for people, but it could serve as a marketable distinction.
Context-based indexing also presents a juicier target for search spammers, but as Costello says, “that’s a success problem.”
It’s one thing to have a nice interface and show users good results, but the size of the Web index that the engine has access to matters a lot as well. And this is where Cuil makes its boldest claim. Costello says that the engine is launching with 120 billion pages indexed, well over the 40 billion he says Google has (although see Google’s latest bluster about the company’s power at Web indexing). Costello also claims that Cuil’s Web crawler is three times faster than Google’s, although it wasn’t clear to me if he meant that is per search computer or for the entire system. Compared with Google’s globe-spanning data network of data centers, some literally set up near dams so they can tap hydro power more efficiently, Cuil’s two puny data centers hosting less than 2,000 PCs total will have to run pretty fast to outpace Google’s crawlers.
Cuil will launch on Monday, and in a refreshing (and gutsy) move, the site is just plain launching. There’s no weasely “beta” tag applied to the service. Costello thinks it’ll be good enough to use from day one.
It won’t, though, be as complete as Google. While Google has had failures in extending its brand (Froogle, Google Base), its collection of services that are affiliated with its mainstream search product, like Google Maps, Image Search, and desktop search, can make switching away from Google difficult for users. Costello realizes that Cuil needs to layer in additional services, but as he said to me, the company has to start somewhere.
Upshot: Cuil is certainly worth trying out. If you like it, services to put it in front of your face (a browser toolbar, and widgets) are coming soon.
As a business proposition, Cuil is obviously a big bet. While search is a monetizable business, it’s hard to change the behavior of a generation of Web users who think “Google” is a verb. No other search engine has come close to entering the public consciousness like this. Of course, Cuil doesn’t have to trounce Google on day one. It took Google quite some time to surpass Alta Vista and Yahoo in the search wars.
Cuil’s About Page Intro:
The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.
Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.
Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.
To be honest, I don’t think that this search engine has any shot against any thing on the net there may be alot of hype right now but it will go away sooner or later leaving them with the hope of improving themselves to be better at what they are doing right now.
While 
